Best solution for weird sized drives?

[Mcot]

Because I am poor I usually buy the cheapest $/GB drives I can get. Traditionally I have just had all of them running as separate drives, and backed up myself. I am looking at using raid because I am getting tired of managing lots of independent drives and I am looking for some automatic redundancy.

The problem is that I have 2X640GB drives, 2X500GB drives and 2X320GB drives. What would be the best solution here so that I don't loose a lot of space by mismatching the drives in raid? Should I do three raid 1 arrays? Another issue is that the 2 500's and the 2 320's are full, so I would have to offload them on to the 640's before I could set up any raid on those, which makes using the 640's with the others kind of impossible.

Thanks.

 

[Back_Packer]

Have you thought about windows home server? It may be a good solution for you. It doesn't use raid, you just select which shares are "duplicated" across multiple drives. I think you can get a free 3 month trial from microsoft right now. Check the hot deals free section.

 

[Mcot]

I will be using openSuse 11.0 or Fedora 9. The filesystems will be ext3.

Im wondering if there is something where I can have the two 500's in raid 1 and the two 320's in raid 1 show up as 820GB total but have redundancy if one of the 500 fails or one of the 320 fails. Sounds like a raid 1+0, but do you need 4 drives of the same size to do that?